Felix The Railway Cat

Suddenly, every bleary-eyed customer who passed through the gates was a suspect. With the commuters having season tickets, Chris and his colleagues barely saw each one for longer than ten seconds as the steady stream of early-morning customers flowed through the doors. It was hardly long enough to make an assessment. Most of them walked slowly, somewhat miserably: not yet woken up properly and none too pleased to be there, on their way to work. Others darted through the gates and ran at full tilt towards a train scheduled to depart. They clutched takeaway coffee cups and newspapers, and headphone cables trailed from their ears as they tried to tune out the reality of another working day. There were people in suits, overalls, uniforms and chemists’ smocks; the cyclists arrived like new breeds of human, with orange Lycra skin and angular helmets reshaping their heads. It could be any one of them: it was like looking for a needle in a haystack.

Could it be the middle-aged woman in the windbreaker who always had a kind word for Felix? Or might it be the hipster who wore media glasses and moleskin shoes and brought the cat treats in a Tupperware box? There was a man with a full beard and long, greying hair who had potential; or what about the redhead with the art portfolio and the sketching pad? The options were literally endless; the mystery seemingly unsolvable.

They never did guess. In the end, a few members of the team messaged the page and offered to help support it by sending through some behind-the-scenes pictures of the station cat hard at work in the back offices, and a channel of communication was opened with the mystery Felix fan.

‘Here,’ Chris said to whoever it was. ‘Make sure you introduce yourself next time you come through. We’ll have a drink or something, get to know each other.’

And that was exactly what happened. It was an ordinary morning, the day the mystery commuter finally walked up and introduced himself. Chris was busy assisting customers when he felt a polite tap on his shoulder at 6.30 a.m. He turned around to see a tall, bespectacled gentleman dressed in a dark-grey suit and carrying a black laptop bag.

‘Hello,’ he said, meekly. ‘I’m Mark Allan. I run Felix’s Facebook page.’

The mystery was solved.

Mark had been commuting from Huddersfield since the summer of 2014. He’d lived in Huddersfield all his life, nearly fifty-five years now, but he’d always driven to work before, being based all over West Yorkshire: Wakefield, Bradford, Leeds … But when he’d got a new job in an office in Manchester, he’d decided to get the train. Every day now, he caught the 6.40 a.m. service from Platform 1.

He hadn’t noticed Felix at first. Many commuters didn’t, being too engrossed in their smartphones or their Metros to spot the railway cat. Mark himself was usually plugged into his headphones, dressed in his dark-grey suit, which, he thought, was the exact same shade as the skies above Huddersfield in winter.

It could be grim, commuting through the Yorkshire winter – but it felt a little like spring had come early at the start of 2015, when Mark had been introduced by the station team to a special little someone.

He’d been walking down the platform that morning, thinking it was just another day, when he’d seen one of the customer-service guys in a yellow hi-vis vest holding and stroking a cat. A cat? Mark did a double take. This must be the station cat. He was famous in Huddersfield (Mark thought she was a boy), but Mark had never seen him.

‘Who’s this, then?’ he asked the attendant in a friendly fashion, pulling the headphones out of his ears and engaging in conversation for once.

‘This is Felix,’ announced Glenn, introducing the cat.

‘Hello there, Felix!’ said Mark cheerily. He reached out a hand and gave Felix a nice stroke. She gazed at him thoughtfully from the safety of Glenn’s arms. ‘My, he’s a grand-looking cat, isn’t he? Very handsome.’

‘Actually, she’s a girl …’

And then the whole story of Felix the station cat was told to him: how she had come to be employed there, and how the team had nicknamed her ‘the pest controller’. In reality, though Felix did still catch the odd mouse, leaving her ‘presents’ for Angie to find, the name was more of a joke than a job description. They didn’t tell Felix that, of course.

Mark wasn’t much of a cat lover, in all honesty. He’d never had cats himself and, frankly, everything he’d seen of cats’ behaviour in his friends’ houses made him think they were a bit of a nuisance. One moggy had completely shredded a mate’s sofa just a month after they’d got it; crikey, he’d thought at the time, my wife would go absolutely up the wall if that happened to us. It’s bad enough having kids, but a cat? No, thanks.